This invention relates to continuously-repetitive volumetric metering apparatus which is especially useful with media such as food product mixtures, e.g., baking doughs and the like, confections, etc.; in a larger sense, however, the metering apparatus lends itself desirably to use with a great many different media, not necessarily limited to the area of food products.
In a more particular sense, and in a more particular application, the invention relates to a highly accurate food product depositor for repeatedly depositing substantially identically sized quantities of food products, such as for example cookie dough, upon a desired carrier such as a bake oven band-type conveyor. In an even more particular sense, the invention relates to what could be termed a highly accurate positive-displacement metering-type apparatus, and to a new concept for a "wire-cut machine", which in the baking trade is a well-known apparatus which operates, generally speaking, by forcing a continuous supply of baking dough downward through shaping orifices, and passing a cutting wire or knife beneath each such orifice at repeated time intervals, thereby slicing off a short cylindrical (or otherwise-shaped) segment of the baking dough, representing an individual cookie or the like.
Wire-cut machines, of the general nature just noted, have long been used in the baking trade, and also to some extent in related fields, and such machines do provide a reasonably consistent food product deposit. In the past, these and other such known types of machines have generally been accepted as being sufficiently accurate to provide the degree of repetitive uniformity regarded as necessary in large baking and other food product processing plants. However, just as in other industries, it is becoming increasingly necessary to provide very accurate, and accurately-repeatable, metered dispensing means, by which each individual deposit is substantially identical with preceding and succeeding deposits, particularly with respect to weight, in order to optimize economic considerations.
As a consequence, there has for some time now been a need for increasingly accurate and highly repeatable depositors, particularly for food products but also for other media as well. While this need has, it is believed, led to consideration of both old and of relatively new machinery concepts, representing at least to some extent departures from known or previously-used concepts, there is believed to be a certain rather definite preferance for retaining types of machinery which are at least generally known and proven. Thus, modified and allegedly improved forms of rotary molding machines have been proposed from time to time, as shown for example in U.S. Pat. No. 2,815,573 to Trelease, which deals with the manufacture of cheese slices, although that apparatus may be considered relatively similar in many ways to the earlier apparatus shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,340,501 to Aasted, dealing with candy manufacture. Other examples of such variations may be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 3,648,624 to Verhoeven, assigned to the assignee of the present invention, and U.S. Pat. No. 2,728,308, showing a rotary machine identified as a "Dough Pump". Still further examples may be seen in the patents to Fay, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,205,837, 3,427,649, and 4,212,609, dealing with a multiple-cavity rotary molding machine disposed beneath a pair of counter-rotating feed rolls fed from a supply hopper. In the latter apparatus, each such molding cavity has an ejecting piston operating from within the rotary cylinder, by which the material in the molding cavity is ejected at a given point in the rotation of the cylinder.